D-Lib Magazine has published a special issue on the Digital Library Evolution. It contains articles such as:
- What Do You Do with a Million Books?
- Data Mining Large Digital Collections
- Document Recognition for a Million Books
- et cetera
An interesting, technocentric view-point emerges from these articles; it is not librarians who will make connections between books, not proofreaders who will edit them, not humans who will know about them, but software.
Conversely, the digital library of the future according to D-Lib Magazine is still tied to a collection and a location, the role of the librarian reduced to the warden of somebody else’s “property”.
Oddly enough, this is almost the exact opposite of my view of the future digital library, where humans are the ones who know about books and make the connections between them, and where there is only one collection, that is tied to no single location.
How do you think the library of the future will pan out?
